Need the functionality of Microsoft Office on your Mac, but can't afford its hefty price tag? Tired of waiting for a universal version of Office for your Intel Mac? Ryan Faas gives the ins and outs of some low-cost and free alternatives.

Blogs

If you're a user of Mac OS X Mail, then you may know that you can use Quick Look to preview image attachments in a message. To do so, just select an image attachment in a message and press the spacebar, press Command+Y, or click Quick Look at the top of the message. For today's Automator Service workflow tip, we'll take this concept a bit further, by creating a way for you to quickly preview URLs in Mail messages, TextEdit documents, and more, without the need to open Safari.

Today's Automator Service workflow tip involves something that I do fairly frequently, merging multiple PDF files together. Fortunately, with Automator Service workflows in Snow Leopard, this is now much easier for me than it used to be.

If you’ve used Automator before, then you may know that it includes actions for performing basic image manipulation tasks, such as cropping and resizing. Today’s workflow uses one of these built-in actions to apply a filter to selected image files in the Mac OS X Finder.